emsenn

I keep noticing settlers reaching for Indigenous knowledge as if we have already lived through an apocalypse and can therefore provide a reusable survival template for the one that’s coming. The story underneath is that colonialism was a kind of world-ending event, Indigenous people survived it, and therefore climate breakdown is just another rhyme in the same historical pattern. That framing quietly turns Indigenous survival into proof that “humanity survives” and even that things eventually come out morally right, with respect and recognition following endurance. It is a comforting narrative because it lets the future feel familiar and manageable, rather than genuinely new. From where I stand, that analogy is false at the level that actually matters. This is not about resilience or spirit or cultural continuity; it is about material conditions exiting historical ranges. I see ecological signals that settlers around me simply do not register as signals at all. When I lived in South Dakota, the limestone was literally falling apart from acid rain. That is not a hard time, a bad cycle, or a familiar stressor. That is the chemical dissolution of the ground itself under conditions that have never existed here before. Knowledge formed in relationship with stable rock, water, and seasons cannot simply be “applied” when those substrates are no longer behaving like themselves. What frustrates me is being asked, implicitly or explicitly, to translate “this is different” into a language that still assumes continuity. Often the turn toward Indigenous knowledge functions less as respect and more as reassurance: a way for settlers to believe they can face collapse without fundamentally changing how they perceive, inhabit, or take responsibility for place. But Indigenous survival under colonialism happened within a world that still operated inside Holocene norms, even as it was violently reorganized. Climate breakdown is pushing us beyond those norms entirely. Treating one as precedent for the other erases the very ecological perception Indigenous people are trying to point to: the moment when a place stops being able to carry the stories told about it.

I bet a lot of folk, especially younger, don't know that one of the popular "photographs" of an older Assata Shakur is actually just a frame from a talk she gave at the World Youth Festival back in 1997. The video is available online, where you can listen to 45 minutes of what Shakur was saying, in her own words, to the future and those who'd be living there. --- I know retweeting the image that reformats a life that was much longer than the state wanted it to be into something you can use to moralize at your friends feels good right now, but try and trust me, you'll feel *better* after watching this video, and better still if you discuss it with friends. <3

My last post was on talking like a pirate, since yesterday was Talk Like a Pirate Day. That post was popular, so I figured I'd try something similar for today, the start of Oktoberfest. So, Oktoberfest. Beer tents, Tracht, dirndls. A feel-good return to Volk roots, especially for people of German descent who now live outside of Germany. Here in the Upper Midwest, it's a popular thing. The specific aesthetic comes the 19th century, when urban German elites romanticizied Alpine peasant dress as their "heritage." (I recall an adorable photograph of a young Ludwig Wittgenstein looking very grumpy in a woolen hat.) But - perhaps not surprising - this fun manifestation of quirky German nationalism has troubling roots: what's known in German scholarship (thanks to Hartmut Lutz) as "Indianthusiasm": the fetishization of Native American culture, especially Plains Indians like the Lakota (like me). (Actually it might be worth mentioning that I'm Lakota and Swiss, so share a rather broad experience with the ideas below.) My nation, and others, were transformed into props for a German story of authenticity that will get reproduced in naive ways all over the United States today. The misunderstanding of Plains culture within German understanding really started with Karl May's /Winnetou/ novels, the first of which was published in 1875. (Winnetou was often represented in Plains territory, despite being Apache, showing how badly the misunderstanding ran.) Karl May, still one of the best-selling German authors, never visited America, but that didn't stop him from churning out books that established what it meant to be a Native American, in the minds of German readership - and many other readers, as the books were translated into other European languages. The books established a phenomenonal number of the tropes that I still find people rely on to shape their understanding of my culture and who I am, which, as a personal aside, is very frustrating. Imagine, white settler reader, if everyone treated you like a character from Great Expectations, everywhere you went? Or, perhaps more accurately, assumed you would behave like the characters in Atlas Shrugged. What May’s novels really did was reduce Lakota and other Plains nations to a set of repeatable genres. The “noble savage,” the feathered warrior, the mystical medicine man, the tipi-and-buffalo camp: these all became fixtures of story, not life. Lakota people became legible only when they fit those roles, which were endlessly copied in pulp, plays, Wild West shows, and hobby clubs. The result is that “being Lakota” was re-written as “being recognizable as Winnetou.” Anything else (politics, farming, modernity) disappeared. This wasn't just happening in Germany, though. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was re-teaching Americans how to view us Lakota: not as a mortal threat to the settler ability to continue genocide, but as quirky historical relics that shows... well, again, I don't need to repeat Nazi rhetoric. And when the Wild West Show went to Germany, it taught those same messages. These messages were incredibly popular among the German public and its politicians, especially after World War I. When the Nazi regime was banning most books, Winnetou was actively promoted, because... well, I don't need to explain Nazi rhetoric here. After the war, there were many Winnetou movies made, and there were even festivals established to celebrate Winnetou, Karl-May-Festspiele in Bad Segeberg. These festivals developed into the many "Indianer" clubs that stage events for appropriating Plains culture. And, like I said, this hasn't been a neutral process. German scholarship shows how from the Kaiserreich to Third Reich, Plains Indians were the stage and props for German debates about identity, nature, and empire. We were even used as a surrogate for power they lacked: imagined to naturalize the Volksgemeinschaft. This imagination didn't require Native people, but certain ideas about native people: those built through the racist treatment that had unfolded over the previous 150+ years. Oktoberfest does the same kind of work, only turned inward. Bavarians (and Germans more broadly) get staged through their own set of stereotypes: the dirndl maiden, the lederhosen farmer, the hearty beer-drinker, the yodeling band. These, too, were codified in the late 19th century, just like May’s Indians: an urban elite invention that re-packaged Alpine peasant life into a consumable image. Again, the living complexity of German society disappears, and what remains is the costume, the mug, the cheer. What ties the “noble Indian” and the “hearty Bavarian” together is that they are not two different sets of characters, but the same genre figure deployed in different directions. Both were produced by the same nineteenth-century Romantic nationalist belief system, which tried to stabilize identity through images of “authentic folk.” For Germans looking outward, the Plains Indian became the fantasy of the natural, noble, unspoiled other: close to land, simple, communal, timeless. For Germans looking inward, the Bavarian peasant was cast in almost the exact same terms: rustic, hearty, close to land, simple, communal, timeless. In both cases, the character is constructed by genring: freezing living peoples into literary tropes that justify a Volk narrative. Whether in buckskin or lederhosen, the figure represents the same thing: a romanticized primitive who guarantees that “real” community and authenticity exist somewhere, and can be claimed by the nation. This is why the mechanism fed both racism and fascism. Once you accept that the nation is made up of pure, authentic “folk types,” then anyone who doesn’t match becomes a threat to the genre coherence of the Volk. Exclusion and violence follow directly from the logic of the story. So the tipi at Bad Segeberg and the beer tent in Munich aren’t just parallel kitsch. They are two stagings of the same archetype, produced by the same nineteenth-century nationalist imagination, and both used to naturalize the Volksgemeinschaft. I'll stop here; to go further would require either deepening the theoretical grounding of what I've said, or move toward looking at the relationship between these processes and contemporary American white nationalism, and both of those are worth their own considerations.

[Yesterday was] Talk Like a Pirate Day. People think that means yelling “ahoy” or “avast.” But that's Treasure Island movie talk, not real pirate talk. Pirate talk wasn’t (just) about silly words. It was about refusing to speak the language of kings and merchants. (A very serious thing, so speaking sillily is a fine way to refuse, on its own.) What made a pirate ship a *pirate* ship was that it rejected the laws of the empires around it, laws that were communicated with words. So words make a big part of that rejection *possible*: pirates developed their own specific "codes" for how to organize their efforts, in a world dominated by one code. On a pirate ship, the captain wasn’t a monarch. He was elected, and he could be deposed the moment he stopped serving the crew. The quartermaster wasn’t a servant; he was the counter-power that kept the captain in check. Articles weren’t law imposed from above; they were agreements drafted and sworn collectively. If a crewmember was injured, lots of ships' code guaranteed their share, because survival depended on everyone being taken care of. That’s what gave pirate words their force. “Mate” wasn’t a gimmick. It named an equal, someone with a voice and a stake. “Share” wasn’t wages; it was recognition that the plunder belonged to all, not hoarded by bosses or thrones. Even the insults, the threats, the bravado! they came from a world where empire’s rules had no legitimacy. Pirates carried the violence of their time: patriarchy, racism, brutality. They weren’t outside history. But they also proved that crews of outcasts could generate their own order, one that terrified rulers precisely because it was anarchic, egalitarian, and contagious. So if you want to talk like a pirate today, don’t (just) pretend with accents. Speak the way they did: from a code made by equals, against the legitimacy of law, in defiance of the world that tries to govern you. That’s pirate talk.

I’ve gotten a few new followers lately, and I want to be clear about where I’m at. My family and I are in the aftermath of gang violence that targeted us for our decolonial work, because it threatened their control... followed by doxxing from settlers for the exact same. My cat was killed as a threat, and we had to abandon not just our personal possessions, but our seed bank, our herbalist equipment: materials and tools we'd spent years gathering in preparation for the kind of work we know needs to be done. I'd already had my identification papers taken by the state years prior, but for the rest of my family, getting them back has been a hassle. We’re okay because we have each other. We've got housing, and there's food banks in the city we moved to. But we lost a lot: stability, safety, and the support of people who decided they’d rather funnel money to NGOs that do nothing than to individuals who “fail” in public. I’m actually glad to know the circle of accomplices is smaller than I thought: better to see that now, before things get even stranger. (And I have to say, it's almost entirely white and settler folk who stepped back their support. Interesting how folk view a native who will teach them how to garden as good politics, but when that native's own garden is threatened, good politics means staying away from something so messy.) But the reality is, I’m up debt creek without an income, and a lot of the things I used to make money, like my microgreens equipment, is gone. What I'm getting through Substack and Ko-fi isn't outpacing the interest on my card, and so I'm getting *further* from being able to do that stuff, not closer. Which is a bummer not just for the strain it puts on my life, but because I think doing that sort of stuff (microgreens, making yogurt), as a disabled person, is one of the better things I can bring to our messed up co-existence. That and my writing, which I'm trying to be more consistent about sharing - that's probably why you're seeing this post in the first place. If you’ve got the means, this is a moment where material support matters. If you can’t give, signal boosting helps too.

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Every time conditions worsen, someone starts pushing the idea of a general strike. Shut it all down! Starve the system! And yeah, it sounds powerful—but here’s what they don’t tell you: It’s a honeypot. And no shade with this subpost, but: If you're suggesting one? It tells me how theoretical and abstract your current relationship to our times is: your post probably isn't going to start a general strike - even though a prosecutor would have no trouble arguing that. You see... Under U.S. law, organizing a general strike—especially across industries—is straight-up illegal. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) makes it a felony to advocate for a mass strike across sectors. Courts ruled long ago that calls for general strikes count as criminal conspiracy—which is why labor leaders, radicals, and workers have been crushed every time they tried to organize one. Think about that: The state doesn’t just want you working, it wants you to believe striking is an option—so they can catch you the second you push too far. They let the words circulate, they let people dream about it, but they’ve ensured that the mechanisms for a general strike are dead on arrival. So what do we do? Instead of fighting on their terms, we need to cultivate the material conditions of a general strike without setting ourselves up for repression. The goal isn’t a moment of resistance; it’s a slow, grinding attrition against capital’s demands. This is something workers and business owners in China have long understood. Within an economy that monitors, tracks, and punishes direct defiance, workers and small business owners have built an entire ecosystem of passive, small-scale disruption: 躺平 (Tangping) – “Lying flat”: Refusing to overwork, avoiding excessive consumption, cutting down on participation in capitalist growth. 摸鱼 (Moyu) – “Touching fish”: Finding ways to slack off at work, do personal tasks on company time, and subtly resist productivity expectations. Small business "slowdowns": Deliberately taking longer to fulfill orders, delaying processes, and subtly reducing efficiency to limit corporate extraction. All of these are done within the boundaries of legality, while still achieving the material slowdown that a strike would bring. Instead of calling for a general strike and waiting for someone to deliver it, start cultivating these practices. The goal isn’t just to “not work”—it’s to starve capital without painting a target on your back. If millions engage in passive disruption, undercut overconsumption, and prioritize resource-sharing over waged survival, we create the material slowdown that capital dreads. They’ve made a general strike impossible. So we don’t give them one. We give them something worse: an economy that bleeds out, quietly, without a single illegal call to action.

Settlers love the idea of resistance. They’ll talk about it, read about it, workshop it. They’ll donate to the right causes, vote for the right candidates, wear the right slogans. But the second resistance moves—the second it acts outside their framework—suddenly, it’s too much. 🔹 It’s too aggressive 🔹 It’s too disorganized 🔹 It’s not strategic enough As if the best strategy for survival is always the one that looks polite from the outside. As if decolonization is a debate club, and not an ongoing struggle against a genocidal system. Because here’s the thing: settlers don’t just resist resistance—they resist any approach to resistance that doesn’t center their logic. 📌 If they wouldn’t do it, it must be wrong. 📌 If it doesn’t fit their morality, it must be unethical. 📌 If it doesn’t lead to a stable world where they still have a place, it must be a failure. Which is why they feel so comfortable dictating the terms of the fight from the safety of their position inside empire. But let’s be real: survival isn’t a moral question. 💀 It’s not about what looks righteous to people who never have to choose between hunger and a broken window. 💀 It’s not about what feels fair to people who have never fought a war they didn’t start. 💀 It’s not about making sure settler liberals don’t have to wrestle with guilt when they read the news. It’s about not dying under a system that was designed to kill you. And settlers hate that framing. Because the moment you stop making your resistance palatable to them— the moment you stop treating their approval as a necessary condition for action— you make it clear that their logic, their morality, their entire way of deciding what is and isn’t justifiable... doesn’t matter. And they can’t stand that. So they do what they always do: They divide resistance into two categories— ✅ Acceptable resistance—non-threatening, slow, symbolic. ❌ Unacceptable resistance—anything that forces a shift before they’re ready. They tell you to be patient. To be peaceful. To wait. To follow their rules— the same rules that made this world unlivable in the first place. But here’s the truth: no resistance in history ever won by making sure its enemies were comfortable. 📌 The world is burning. 📌 Settlers are still debating whether it’s okay to inconvenience their neighbors. If you want to fight for a future that isn’t just an extension of settler logic— if you want to fight for a future at all— stop waiting for their permission. They were never going to give it.

Every generation of radicals prepares for **the crackdown**—encrypted chats, burner phones, avoiding cameras. We train ourselves to dodge the big, obvious threats 🚔👀. But that’s not what kills movements. The real danger isn’t a spotlight, it’s a slow dimming of capacity. It’s not the surveillance that stops you. It’s working late to make rent. It’s being too tired to show up. It’s your free time eroding into survival time. Fascism doesn’t just come with jackboots and raids. It comes with rising grocery bills 🏠💰 disappearing community spaces 🏗️ and 60, 70, 80-hour workweeks that drain every ounce of energy... ...before you can make it to the distro. They don’t need to **repress** you if they can just **keep you too busy to resist**. So, yeah: Use Signal. Mask up. Be smart. But also: - **Keep your people housed.** - No one organizes while drowning in rent debt. - **Keep your people fed.** - A hungry movement is a dying movement. - **Keep your people from disappearing into the grind.** - A slow fade is still a loss. Because the real question isn’t **who avoids the crackdown**?... It’s **who’s still fighting once it's in full effect**?